


The Girls, Part II

by fluorescentgrey



Series: In the Garden [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Punk, Recreational Drug Use, Relationship Negotiation, Wizard Rock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 08:02:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11009301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Summer 1991. Or: Trials By Different Fires: How Saint Rose Subscribed toSevere Asceticism.





	The Girls, Part II

**Author's Note:**

  * For [swift_river_singing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swift_river_singing/gifts).



****Trials By Different Fires: How Saint Rose Subscribed to _Severe Asceticism  
_ _ Wizarding Rock Weekly cover story, August 1992  
by Magdalene Cruz, managing editor _

Everyone knows nothing good ever happens in a Knockturn Alley dive bar after midnight. But who better to spend the witching hour with than Flora St. James and Imani Rose, the former rhythm section of the Hobgoblins? Last week, on the hallowed cavernous stage of Dyatlov & Roswell, Flora and Imani’s new band Saint Rose premiered most of their new album _Severe Asceticism_ (dropping this summer on D&R co-owners Evvy Mitchell and Croydon Crag’s new label Hellfire Club) live to the first sold-out crowd of their month-long residency. We caught up with the living legends after the gig:

WRW: I think the last thing any of us thought was that you’d be back so quickly with a new group. 

IMANI: It was the last thing we thought too. Actually before we made the record I thought we were going to find some beautiful place and walk in and not come out. 

FLORA: We did that a little. We were in Seattle [in Washington State, USA] writing most of the album. That’s where we met Graeme [Sugarbush, Saint Rose’s touring guitarist]. We borrowed his parents’ camping gear and we were in the woods for a long time. 

GRAEME: I was worried they had died or been swallowed up or something out there and I would have to explain to my parents what I’d done with their camping gear. Because I was counting on them not noticing it was gone. 

WRW: How did you decide to recruit Graeme and Sal [Abidi, touring drummer, formerly of Crushing Valerian]? 

IMANI: We wrote most of the record with Flora on bass and me on keyboards. So it made sense we had to look for a guitarist and a drummer — 

FLORA: — though I play the guitar and Imani plays the drums on the record — 

IMANI: — we were mulling over who we might ask to join us, in the studio, and Flora said, well, it’d be literally impossible to play all the drum tracks at the same time, but probably the only person who could get almost there is — 

FLORA: — is Sal, and the only person who could get close to all the guitar tracks is obviously Graeme. 

SAL: It’s rather terrifying, isn’t it, the sentence finishing… 

WRW: How do you two feel about playing with two of wizarding Britain’s most beloved musicians? 

GRAEME: Probably like how they felt playing in the Hobgoblins. 

[ raucous laughter ] 

GRAEME: That’s a cruel joke. Really I’m honored. 

SAL: They weren’t kidding about the drum tracks, though. It’s physically impossible. 

IMANI: He does a wonderful job. It’s an unenviable task. 

WRW: It seems like the tour is a more collaborative effort. But writing the record — 

FLORA: — just the two of us in the woods. With Graeme’s parents’ tent with the needlepoints in it. 

IMANI: We needed to — we hadn’t really ever tried to write full songs just the two of us. We would make sketches, you know. So we needed to learn how to color all of everything in ourselves. A bloody steep learning curve I can tell you. 

WRW: What was the most challenging thing about it? 

FLORA: Just believing that it could happen. Shaking out everything that happened before. Believing that we could do it just us two.

IMANI: Believing that it wasn't over. It was a hell of a lot of wishful thinking. But it was another trial by fire really. 

FLORA: We almost called the album that. Our whole history is like trials by different fires. 

—

** Summer 1991 **

\--

“Mani.” 

“Hmm.” 

“Mani, come on, get up.” 

She turned on her back and the sun through the high window fractured through her hangover like light through a prism. “Bloody Christ.” 

“You’re alright. We’ve got to go.” 

“What was all that about various wines…” 

“ _Brideshead Revisited_. Our bus is in six minutes.” 

“Jesus, you couldn’t’ve — ”

“It’s as bad for me,” said Flora tightly. “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself. Come on.” 

Imani got up. The hostel floor spun. She leaned her forehead for a second against the cool metal of the upper bunk. The girl in it stirred and turned over pointedly. Flora already had their backpacks packed and zipped up and bus tickets in hand. On the bed she’d put Imani’s sweatshirt and a new pair of socks. 

They went out together two minutes later — Imani’s boots untied — and ran helter-skelter in the dawn street toward the Greyhound station; the world was spinning like in some dismal acid trip, and the faster she ran the more the nausea kind of displaced itself to somewhere else, like into her head, or into her throat, and a half a block away she puked. 

Flora was just ahead and she paused and looked back exasperatedly like at a mortally wounded comrade still kind of jogging backwards. “Mani — ”

“I’m coming. I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” 

They got on the bus and the driver shut the doors. They took the last two seats beside each other toward the back and Imani bent double with her head between her knees and Flora rubbed her back a little up toward the shoulders. There had been not so much physical contact between them lately and so Imani tensed at first but then she reached down and clasped Flora’s ankle in her hand. 

\--

In Pittsburgh they got off the bus and went into a single stall in the disgusting squalid bathroom at the terminal and dug out hangover relief potions from their backpacks, which they drank. Then they shoved the backpacks into the lockers out in the waiting room and went out into the pale day. 

“You slept the whole way so you didn’t see,” Imani said. “The hills and the trees and the clouds.” 

“There are hills and trees and clouds all across America.” 

“Yeah. These were special.” 

“We’ve been here before,” said Flora. “I don’t understand why we’re here again.” 

“We’ve only been here before working.” 

“Working.” 

“Yeah. It was work. Emotional labor.” 

At another time Flora would’ve ducked in front of her and squeezed her bicep and put her face really close to Imani’s face and her foot between Imani’s feet and said, what about physical labor love, ha ha ha, but this wasn’t that time, so she didn’t. 

“In all honesty I figured maybe we shouldn’t go somewhere new after all that,” Imani said. “Maybe we should go somewhere sort of friendly.” 

“I don’t find America at all friendly.” 

“Well maybe you should’ve raised these concerns before we bought all the bloody bus tickets.” 

“I would’ve done anything to get out of London. I just didn’t think very much about what it was.” 

“Then maybe you should stop complaining.” 

They had come to the dismal confluence of the Ohio and the Monongahela and the Allegheny. Flora shaded her eyes with her hand and looked out over the sun-spangled water. Her black nail polish was chipping. There was industrial trash washed up along the shore and floating in the muddy water and Imani felt suddenly almost unbearably sad. She sat down heavily on the concrete wall. There were a few of those twenty-five cent binocular viewers for Muggle tourists spotted along the waterfront but there was chewed gum jammed in the eyeholes. 

“You’re so dramatic when you’re hungover,” said Flora. 

“Pot, kettle.” 

Flora was quiet for a moment, perhaps digesting this. But then she said, “Whatever.” 

\--

Of course they were going to have a fight. There had been two months in London after the accident taking care of assorted paperwork for Amortentia and the MLE and about six different sets of lawyers, and Whyland Boardman had asked them to sign something saying they agreed Ras should be in a psychiatric hospital, which Flora had cried about, and Imani had testified as a character witness for Jack, which had required more paperwork, and she had tried to talk Flora into testifying too, but Flora had declined and had neglected to explain why. They hardly spoke in the two months which in the tiny apartment was strange and they didn’t have sex much and when they did it was sort of vengeful and extremely intense, and then they didn’t talk about that either. Imani had learned some piano over the years and so she went out and bought a keyboard at a Muggle shop and stayed up all night magicking it so as to avoid doing anything else. They each wrote songs when the other was out. One night around two in the morning sitting on the living room couch writing with headphones on while Flora slept in the other room Imani realized that they had been together for about exactly eight years. For a while she laid on the couch and tried to cry as silently as was possible. Then she wrote a song. At first it sounded so much like one of Jack’s songs that it almost shocked her, so she stayed up until dawn making it sound like anything other than one of Jack’s songs: 

_Oh my God, we were just the girls  
_ _But you were my girl and I was your girl  
_ _And we were the only two in the world…_

\--

They took a bus through the night to Detroit half-sleeping in the flashing vibrant highway neon and at 9am exactly with the payphone in the hostel Flora called the airport to see about tickets back to London. Imani listened for a while but then she went out onto the stoop and had a cigarette watching across the street feral cats wandering through the summer-overgrown vacant lot. In the dust at the edge of the heaving broken sidewalk faded plastic pieces caught the light flatly and after a moment she realized they were insulin needles having been used for injecting heroin. 

She had another cigarette and looked through their bus tickets after this to Chicago to Minneapolis to Bismarck to Bozeman to Spokane and finally to Seattle. The whole middle stretch was virgin territory they’d never set foot before as the magical communities of North Dakota and Montana were cast across the vast country like kernels of corn or something adhering to ley lines, resonant monuments, and potable aquifers. Imani had thought perhaps they would skip their ride to Spokane and wander into Glacier Park and not come out for a while as they had done with beautiful haunted-wild space in wanderings previous across continents, specifically seeking such solitude where even Jack and Ras’s cleverest and most desperate owls couldn’t find them. As such she had only bought tickets through to Seattle, and because she knew Flora liked the bands from there and maybe would want to stay for a while, or perhaps from there things would be better and they could fly home and home would feel like home. 

Flora came out and went down the stairs to the sidewalk and kicked one of the needles into the brush with the toe of her heavy boots. “Don’t touch those,” Imani said. 

“I’m not — I’m — Jesus. The tickets are like six hundred dollars.” 

“Each? One way back to London?” 

“Yes — there’s something — I don’t know. They don’t get cheaper until next week.” 

“We could stay around here for — ”

“We might as well go to Seattle. This place is depressing.” 

“It’ll look better to you once you’ve slept,” Imani said. She found it depressing too but for the sun and the silence. It was quite lovely if one closed one’s eyes which could be said for many places she’d been. 

Flora looked like she wanted to say something like, you don’t know me as well as you think you do, which would have been a kind of defensive and self-protective lie. She kicked a stone this time off the sidewalk and into the high crabgrass. “Let’s have a nap and then walk along the river,” Imani said. 

“What for?” 

“When you’re in a new city in the summer you should walk along the river.”

“We have been to Detroit before.”

“I think technically that was Hamtramck.” Besides they had spent the entire time in the bathroom at the venue in states of undress for some reason Imani had forgotten which had seemed the entire time to be very urgent and pressing. Flora had gotten a new tattoo or something. Imani looked up to her to see if perhaps she was remembering also but she had looked away. I’m gonna die, Imani thought suddenly, this is the end. The sun was coming across the lot through the shiny crabgrass in such blunt apocalypse flatness it seemed to herald the ceasing of the earth’s rotation. And Flora wouldn’t look at her. And in the entire time she had been sitting out on the stoop no one had walked by. 

_And we were the only two in the world…_

“We should walk,” Imani tried pathetically, “tonight, on the river, Flora, please.” 

“Alright.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yes, alright.” 

Flora’s brow and eyes had softened a little but she still looked away across the lot. Somewhere either a cat or a baby was crying. I love you, Imani was thinking, didn’t say. 

\--

Imani had done her undergraduate study in Accra at Ghanaian Women’s Witching Academy where her aunt was a tenured professor in Magical Musicraft. When she graduated at seventeen she went back to England ostensibly to study magical archaeology at the Magical Graduate College of London but also to play drums. At school in Accra she and her friends had spent a lot of time shopping for American and British music in owl order magazines and going round the record shops stoned on weekends to buy tapes by King Sunny Ade and Fela Kuti and pleading with the proprietors to order albums from New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Jam, Orange Juice, Bad Brains. When she went back to England she had no band and no money and had had to sell most of her record collection to afford her flat, which was actually more like a single room in a flat in Chalk Farm. To add insult to injury it became pretty much immediately clear she was going to have to drop out of MGC because every professor in the magical archaeology department seemed to have a Eurocentric and colonialist approach to their field and pretty much laughed in her face when she said her major interest was in the politics of repatriation of wizarding artifacts. And to add further insult she started playing in this band called Draught of Living Death. 

It was her on the drums and four boys who were potions majors, Hogwarts alums, two Ravenclaws and two Slytherins, which didn’t mean much to her then; eventually she realized it should have been a clue. It seemed they wanted to sound like New Order except not good. The singer had basically no musical ability but thought he did, and his lyrics and onstage demeanor were a poor approximation of Ian Curtis’s. Imani wanted to quit after one show but felt bad and had nothing else to do, because she’d stopped going to class. Eventually the band’s bass player quit in a riotous huff during a rehearsal owing, Imani assumed, to some intra-group sexual misadventure, and was replaced two weeks later by a tall and wary girl from one of the guitarists’ antidotes development lab. She was wearing a Slits t-shirt and cutoff black denim shorts with ripped-up sheer drugstore pantyhose (the seam up the back of her legs was endearingly crooked) and mid-calf cranberry leather Doc Martens and a metric ton of vintage jewelry which was oxidizing against the back of her neck and she had very recently cut and colored (black) her hair herself in her squalid flat in Camden Town. 

Their flirtation was measured and irregular. In another month’s time Flora invited Imani to come drive around with her in the suburbs in search of estate sales, which it seemed was her favorite pastime, and which Imani herself had never attempted. They found moth-eaten fur coats and lacy black things and ridiculous boots, jewelry, old records, lockets containing curls of reddish hair warm from the sun, patterned silk shirts, Moddish trousers; they flirted with the old ladies running the counters and flirted with each other outrageously, and on the way back to London they dressed in their best finds and stopped for tea in a town so bucolic and lovely Imani remembered thinking it couldn’t possibly be real, and in the car afterward laughing about something, laughing like she had just been born, she thought, and feeling such a sharp glee it was specially painful, like being high and hearing the washing high pitch in white noise, Flora kissed her. Kind of in this way that reminded Imani of the William Carlos Williams poem (“This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox…”) and also of a Sonic Youth song they hadn’t written yet. 

They went back to Flora’s squalid flat and dragged Flora’s dresser against the door to prevent intrusion by roommates (the hardwoods under the dresser were grooved enough to suggest to Imani this was a semi-regular occurrence) and Imani put on the black lace lingerie ripped in needle-thin tears in places through the fine mesh and a moth-eaten mink coat and a jaunty yellow silk scarf and Flora put on about fifty costume necklaces and massive chandelier earrings and laddered thigh-high stockings and nothing else but a refresher coat of wine-red lipstick and Brian Eno’s _Here Come the Warm Jets_. They smoked a joint sitting on Flora’s mattress feigning high-class accents. Laughing and laughing. “We ought to quit that sodding band, dahling,” Flora said. She blew a huge cloud of opaque smoke sensually in Imani’s face through the red O of her lips. 

“I’m afraid I’ll perish from boredom if I quit that sodding band dahling as I’ve left the university.” 

This was technically a lie as she hadn’t done the paperwork yet but it was sitting on her bed at home where she thought she never wanted to go again. Her brain was going down the dark path it had been lately due in part to the kind of electric and spiraling mental suction of the weed and she thought, so desperately in Flora’s direction she thought it might punch through her skull like one of the Giger creatures from _Alien_ , for God’s sake fuck me, fuck me as hard and slow as you can stand, even if only now and never again, black me out, erase me… 

“Have you really,” said Flora, in her own Yorkshire accent now. 

“In all but name, I suppose. Let’s not — ” She took hold of the thick gold chain of one of Flora’s necklaces at her breast and it was warm from her skin. “Let’s not talk about it, Flor, please.” 

They didn’t, not even in the morning, nor that night; Flora had gone to class and Imani had stayed in her bed all day wearing one of her fancy antique nightgowns and reading Graham Greene novels and listening to her record collection, to Felt and Husker Du and the Fall and the Replacements, Echo and the Bunnymen’s _Ocean Rain_. Flora came back later that night with an entire pizza they let go cold fucking whilst listening to Cabaret Voltaire. Thence came the seemingly inconsequential decision which sealed their eternal fate: 

“What time’s it,” Flora said, against Imani’s mouth. 

Imani turned her head to look at her watch and Flora stuck her tongue in her ear flicking against the shell of it in a hinting sort of way. “Seven fifty-seven.” 

“Want to put the radio on?” 

“What for?” 

“Do you know that girl El Rice? Arithmancy major?” 

“Never met her.” 

“I think she’s a werewolf. She has a radio show; it’s quite good actually.” 

“A werewolf with a radio show.” 

“She always has someone cover it whenever the full moon falls on a Tuesday.” 

“Alright, let’s put it on.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yeah, yes. I never actually listened to the campus radio.” 

“It’s not all bad.” 

Flora tried to get up to put it on and Imani couldn’t bear it and pulled her back down. Flora was smiling with teeth against her neck and warm and even her sweat smelled like coffee and pot and roses to Imani, the metal and dust of her old clothes, her books, cauldron cleaning potions and supplies, the smooth cold curves of her rings against Imani’s skin. “Do you want to listen to it or what,” Flora said. “We don’t have to.” 

So in the end of course the decision had been hers. Later she would wonder if Flora resented her for this. “I want to, no, I want to. Just be quick.” 

Flora got up and put the radio on and Imani piled all the covers on top of herself in the cool rainy draft through the window and peeked out at Flora with her most yearning eyes. She was tuning through static with one black-lacquered finger and Imani could feel the lightning-shock of her magic in the room like the sound of a bell ringing almost too far away to hear — and then she found the frequency she wanted, on which two boys were laughing. They were joking about the Beatles. One of them had a South London accent and the other’s was so posh as to sound like the mockery Flora and Imani had been doing the night previous. 

“El has live bands on sometimes,” Flora explained. She sat on the edge of the mattress and wrapped her knit afghan around her bare shoulders. Imani reached for her lap and Flora knit their fingers. She was thinking how incredible it was to be new in love. How miraculous to touch someone and to be touched by that someone. Her mouth tasted like Flora and her skin and hair smelt like Flora from lying all day in Flora’s bed. 

“How come we’ve never been invited?” 

“Probably because half the band are Slytherins and think werewolves should be burnt at the stake.” 

As if on cue on the radio the boy with the Brixton accent said, “Interested drummers and bassists are hereby prompted to call on us at home, if anyone wants to associate with us ever again after this.” 

Flora looked at Imani with eyebrows. Then she looked back toward the radio as though she had been too presumptuous. 

“We live on Western Road in Fortis Green,” said the boy on the radio. Lovely Jack. It was strange to even think of a time when she hadn't known what Jack looked like. Flora looked at her again more bravely this time. 

“We haven’t even heard what they sound like,” said Imani. Though of course she knew already they would go in a few days’ time to Fortis Green. The band had a drum machine that made Imani cringe and the lack of bass was glaring. They sounded good and loud and the way they played was almost shocking, sounding like nothing else Imani had ever heard, and they laughed with one another when they played. Like their accents their voices were imperfect and mismatched as were those of their guitars. She was imagining what they must look like and later learned she had not accurately captured either of them (Ras’s beauty and his lazy eye, Jack’s striking oddness, the way they dressed like refugees from the tandem shipwrecks of glam and punk, the way they looked at one another, this most importantly, as though the other contained 99.9% of the meaning of life and history of the universe written inside their brain just out of sight) and in fact she had not even been close. 

“The Hobgoblins,” said El Rice at the end of the band’s set. Someone was clapping with her in the studio. “Wow, our very own Ras Boardman and Jack Childermass, their very first live performance…” 

She thought of it sometimes like lying there in Flora’s bed ensconced in her bedding like a fevered Victorian she had put the chains on both of them, or rather they had both put the chains on themselves and each other, and they had chained them to the voices and the music on the radio and the static, out of some kind of twisted sense of moral duty… Toward the end of it Imani had read an article in a feminist witchery publication about the psychological history of women’s caretaking “instinct” and obligation and had been so livid and drunk she’d smashed the front windows of their flat. But when she really thought about it, and when she was feeling better about it, and when it wasn’t bad between the four of them, or between herself and Flora, she could almost remember how she had felt then, listening to the music for the first time, and feeling like it was the most special thing in the world, and the first and best to have ever been, the sound of Jack and Ras together singing, _I’ve tried to put it past me but there’s something in the way…_

\--

The next morning they took a bus to Chicago where they spent a night and a day before the overnight trip to Minneapolis. The bus arrived at six in the morning and they put their backpacks in a locker in the station and stumbled down the street to a 24-hour diner for plates of eggs and bacon. 

“What is with American breakfast,” said Flora, head in her hands on the table, staring into the unblinking lens of her plastic glass of orange juice. 

“How so.” 

“No beans. Pathetic sausages. Horrible tea… burnt coffee…” 

“It’s different and special in its own way.” 

“How can you be so bloody chipper.” 

“One of us needs to maintain relative gaiety and you haven’t said a nice thing about anything in weeks so…” 

Flora looked up, wanting a fight by the look in her face. Imani looked past her down the bar at the waitresses in their uniforms. It seemed to her that they had stumbled into a teen movie from the 1950s. 

“Why does one of us need to _maintain relative gaiety_. Because to me it just seems like you’re willfully shoving everything into the back of your head where it’ll catch up with you sooner or later.” 

“I’m having a lovely time,” Imani lied. “I love America. I’m trying to leave things in the gutter where they came from.” 

“It’s not going to work anymore. How you compartmentalized things when we were — now that it’s over it won’t work like that anymore.” 

She almost said, who says it’s over? The night previous on the bus while Flora slept she had written a letter to Jack in prison saying, if you ever want to play music with me again I’ll take you back. I don’t care if the others won’t. Then she had burned it, because she wasn’t sure if she even meant it. One of the waitresses brought her and Flora’s breakfasts — roasted potatoes, eggs, bacon, toast, packets of butter and strawberry jam — and another came to refill their coffees. Flora poked the yolk of one of her eggs with the crooked tines of her fork and her nose wrinkled minutely as she watched the neon yellow sludge spill out across the plate. 

“Maybe if you hadn’t convinced yourself everything sucked and the world was horrible you would enjoy it,” Imani said, though she had taken a bite of her own eggs and they were sort of rubbery. 

“Maybe if you thought for even two seconds about our objective reality instead of pretending everything was fine and normal you would have some sympathy.” 

I’m not pretending everything’s fine and normal, she didn’t say. What even is fine and normal? We haven’t been fine or normal since 1984 when we got thrust onto this roller coaster which only got steeper and sharper and more rickety with time… So it was really the sudden rocketing to a halt which had shocked her, she reasoned. Perhaps the truth was that things were more fine and normal now than they had been in seven years. Perhaps the facts that Jack was in prison and Ras was in a mental hospital and she had become an insomniac and Flora seemed to have actualized her latent anger issues were all part and parcel of fine and normal. 

She didn’t say anything at all and instead busied herself opening several individual packets of strawberry jam in attempt to lend edibility to the toast. And then a voice behind them said, “Do I know you girls from somewhere?” 

Imani turned on her stool. It was a tall man, a wizard, she could tell, in overalls and a flannel shirt and a patterned wool coat. There was a young couple in a booth by the window watching them. In the glass Imani’s own reflection was befuddled and haggard. She turned to Flora, who cocked an eyebrow and opened her mouth a little wryly like she might say something. But Imani said, “I don’t think so.” 

“Are you sure?” the wizard asked. “It’s just you look — ”

“I’m sure,” Imani said. Her voice sounded sharper than she wanted it to. 

“We live a very quiet life in the country actually,” said Flora. Imani laughed because it was so absurd. “I’m an accountant and Brunhilde is an industrial designer.” 

The man turned toward Imani. “What kind of industrial design,” he said jovially. 

“Slaughterhouses, for chickens mostly.” 

“Is that depressing?” 

“Oh, very much so…” 

The couple at the table by the window leaned across the table toward one another smiling. 

“She was the most in-demand slaughterhouse designer in Britain,” Flora went on. She wrapped her arm around Imani’s shoulders and the thrill of her now-rare touch felt completely disastrous. “You Americans scooped her.” 

“Got to have the best of the best,” said the wizard. “Have a lovely day, girls.” 

They finished their meal and paid and went out onto the street. “Why didn’t you want to tell him,” Flora said, though she knew. 

“You know what he would’ve asked if we said. I don’t know. I’d rather build slaughterhouses.” 

“That was genius really.” 

“Plus I can’t blindly trust American wizards. You know all the pure bloods vote Sanguicrat.” 

“Jesus. Do you remember when Ras — ”

“ — hexed that one kid… how could I forget. What hex even was that.” 

“One of his Salem witch trial ones. The kid said something like, you’re too good to be in a band with three — what _is_ their American slur for Muggle-borns.” 

“Something to do with shit. I forget. I hadn’t known that’s what he said.” 

“Yeah. It was lucky Jack wasn’t there I guess. I don’t think he knows about it. Or he knows Ras hexed someone but not why.” 

“When was that?” 

“The first trip we did in America, ’86. Ras had that stupid yellow pastel turtleneck and he looked like an Easter chick. We were just out front having a fag. It was somewhere you wouldn’t expect it, like maybe Philadelphia.” 

“All that and he wouldn’t play that song of Jack’s.” 

Flora’s brow tightened. “It’s different to say something so loudly.” 

“Is it.” 

“Yes. At least for him.” 

They had disagreed about this before, mildly, altogether not really wanting to broach it, pretending they were as frustrated with both of them equally, and their monomania and myopia about most things, that magic thing they condescended occasionally to let Imani and Flora touch, and how possibly no one in the universe except Imani and Flora considered it Imani and Flora’s band, even in part, even on the songs they’d written, even when Jack and Ras were singing Imani and Flora’s words, and how in the end of the day there would be no music without them, and that certainly without them Jack would be dead, and as such probably Ras would be dead too. Perhaps it would have been easier for them to get on with it if it was as they were pretending but the fact stood that Imani thought it was all Ras’s fault and Flora thought it was all Jack’s fault. This, apparently above all else, was irreconcilable. 

\--

She realized sometimes how little they had talked about of any consequence. Sometimes she would sit with Jack reading or something while he played guitar and eventually she would just watch him play because he looked like he was in such incredible agony and it was like a car wreck or something from which one could not tear away one’s eyes. She regretted not saying anything about it but she assumed she knew what it was about and that Jack probably wouldn't want to talk about it because he probably hadn’t even realized what it was about. 

They walked together in Regent’s Park sharing a joint. “How _is_ Flora,” Jack said, “like, really.” 

“Tired. We’re both tired. But it’s alright.” 

“And how is it, how are, you know, how’s you _and_ Flora.” 

“Fine.” 

“Really?” 

“Yes. It just works.” 

Bloody entitled bullshit, she thought about it now. And a little cruel perhaps to say to Jack, the most important relationship in whose life resoundingly didn’t just work. More than once, usually while shitfaced, she’d thought about telling him, you two should just fuck and probably it would get easier. After all it was how she and Flora worked out most of their problems, idiotically. 

\--

Bismarck, Bozeman, Spokane. They slept on the bus at night, or rather Flora slept and Imani drifted between scattered dreams and reality, and tried to write to Jack, and watched the highway and the lights, the pickups pulling off onto unmarked ranch roads into the blue-black fields, and the night occasionally illuminated by a scouring flash of lightning. The waving wheat and corn in the grey wash of dawn. Flora’s face composed in sleep and furrowed in the brow like a Renaissance sculpture of a bemartyred saint. They got off the bus and wandered in the city unspeaking and when Flora went into a shop for coffee Imani sat on the stoop outside in the cool morning and read over the postcard she’d written to Jack: 

_We are in North Dakota. There’s nothing here really. Taking the bus last night, I thought of a thousand lyrics for songs about isolation breeding discontent. But I guess you can experience that even elsewhere from the high prairie. It’s so flat here and there’s hardly any trees even. I haven’t really been sleeping so everything seems almost extraordinary dire. But don’t worry about me, I’ve got a bed, I’ve got a Christmas tree inside my head, as you always say._

_I am thinking of you, wishing you well. I love you no matter what. IR_

She thought probably she should burn it. Instead she got up and walked back to the mailbox they’d passed on their way from the bus to send it. Because most of the population in lower-security British wizarding prisons on drug or illegal spell use charges were Muggle-born the Ministry had put systems in place within the Muggle post so their families could contact them. So the secretary at the Ministry’s Department of Criminal Justice had given Imani an address, ostensibly to give to Jack’s parents, though she’d never met Jack’s parents, and Jack had always told her he was certain his parents thought he was dead. Before she could think twice about it she dropped the postcard in the mailbox and walked back toward the cafe. Flora was standing outside looking utterly gobsmacked, holding two coffees, frozen like a sleepwalker, and Imani realized belatedly it looked as though she had up and left, and she wanted to run into Flora’s arms, to hold her tightly… she had started running when Flora turned and saw her and her expression shuttered again, turned frigid, darkened like a thunderstorm, and so she stopped running. 

For lack of anything else to do they went together to the university art museum and wandered in silence in the dusty rooms. 

\--

There was a sharp and visible sort of delineation when America became the Northwest and they went over it in the middle of the night between Bozeman and Spokane. Imani had tried to write to Ras but had given up and instead she was watching out the window with her hands cupped around her eyes to keep them from the dimmed fluorescent night lights around them on the bus. Flora had fallen asleep on her shoulder and outside the bus was climbing a sharp rise into the mountains. For a while Imani had tried to listen to her walkman and fall asleep but she didn’t have any tapes that sounded better than Flora’s gentle snoring and the close droning vibration of the bus tires on the highway. The trees were getting tall and heavy and the night and the reflection of the bus headlights in the road drew them in a shocking underworld cochineal. She couldn’t sleep and she tried to remember if she had had trouble sleeping when they’d toured America before. She remembered that things had felt alright and that they had been happy even though Ras and El Rice were reckless drivers and they always had drugs in the car and she knew all the horror stories about American Muggle cops and sometimes they found cultist transmissions on the radio in the middle of the night and more than once they were approached by zealous young witches and wizards with Sanguicrat buttons and pamphlets. It had seemed at the time like a strange breed of local flair and anyway things weren't much better in London and they were invincible because they had each other. 

There were sinister associations to it now. The last time they had been in Seattle she and Flora and El had backpacked in the mountains and when they came back they found Jack and Ras had written “Mud Blood Blues.” That song was the end or the beginning of something, she understood now, or it was both, and anyway she couldn’t begrudge it, whatever it was, because it was probably the second-best song they’d ever done after “A Handful of Dust,” and because it was necessary. 

In the morning in Spokane Imani asked if Flora would walk with her along the river and Flora said she would rather not. So Imani walked along the river herself, and eventually she sat on a bench and re-read the letter she’d tried to write to Ras: 

_We’re in America in a terrible row. Right now we’re on the bus from Bozeman, Montana to Spokane, Washington. Flora’s asleep and this is the only time she’ll get near me. I don’t remember the last time I slept which is why everything I’m about to say is so Drama. But I’m fucking dying Ras and I think this is hell. It’s taking me a lot of energy and strength and attempt at empathy for you not to chew you out in this bloody letter. Or not to send you a bloody Howler because when you follow the circuitous path of everything back to the beginning it starts and ends with you. But I know you know this and you’re probably killing yourself over this. I think you know exactly what you’ve done wrong and you knew it when you did it. But you did it anyway._

_None of us are blameless in this fucking shit. I don’t even know what to say to Jack. I don’t know what to say to myself or to Flora. Maybe we could’ve done more but I don’t know what that could’ve been. Do you remember the night Jack OD’d when I hit you? I was just thinking about that the other day. Funny when you don’t sleep your memory turns into like a movie playing in your head all the time — a really bad long slow one with moments of fuzzy dramatic action. You were such a wreck. I thought you were just going to keel over and die but then I thought I also was going to. How much does fame just fuck you… when other people make their living off your heart and soul. And when thousands of fucking kids see their hearts and souls in your heart and soul. When you have to share your heart and soul unilaterally with three other people. When one of those other people IS your heart and soul but you can’t really tell them that in so many words._

_I’m still on your side and have always been. I’m telling you all this because I’m on your side. I love you and I am only hoping you get better because I know you are capable of such bravery and such love._

She stuck her tongue out and almost threw the letter in the river. Instead she lay down on the bench with her sweater under her head and watched the current. She must have fallen asleep though her dreams moved quickly and were not so much dreams, and she was awoken in less than an hour’s time by a Muggle cop who shook her shoulder unkindly with his other hand on his truncheon. 

\--

It was raining when they arrived in Seattle, which was wrong for the season, but by the time they had walked up the hill and stumbled into a 24-hour diner for breakfast and coffee and stumbled back out again almost caffeinated enough to attempt conversation the mist had cleared and the sky was a sharp bright blue. Flora ducked into a shop for cigarettes and they kept walking up toward 15th Avenue and Volunteer Park in the hungover morning silence. They hadn’t booked a place to stay that night nor any further bus tickets and Imani was painfully aware of both facts. In the park Flora wandered around the green looking for a soft dryish place to spread their picnic blanket out and Imani tried a phone booth by the reservoir only to find both speaker and receiver had been plugged up with chewed bubble gum. Around the base of it were one or two of the small single-use insulin needles gummy with a caramel sort of gunk and a cold chill passed up Imani’s spine. 

She went back toward Flora who was still wandering in the grass as though divining for something, looking relatively monastic with her heavy pack and hunched back and hoodie pulled up over her unwashed hair. “Watch for needles,” Imani said. 

“I have been. They’re under the trees.” 

She had caught Jack at it more than once, Imani knew; they hadn’t talked about it an altogether that much detail. 

“You see anybody around?” 

Flora looked askance. “There was a guy with a dog when we came in.” 

“I saw him go out. I’m gonna do a spell.” 

When they travelled usually they kept their wands in their packs. And besides they were both skilled enough with age and necessity to perform spells for levitation and summoning and the like without wands. Imani gestured a rectangle about the size of their blanket and levitated everything loose in it; the worst, besides goose shit and insect carcasses, was a condom wrapper Imani floated away. Then Flora put the blanket down. “Do you want to sleep,” she said.

“Yeah, desperately, if I can.” 

“Alright.” 

“Don’t up and leave me like that one time in — ”

“I’ve apologized for that. I was fucking stoned.” 

“Well don’t do it again.” 

“Jesus, of course I won’t.” 

“I didn’t mean to — I was joking. I know you won’t.” 

Flora didn’t say anything. She was digging in her backpack for the book she’d bought at the witches’ bookstore they’d found in Minneapolis (the feminist werewolf packleader Margaret Ramsay’s 1906 _Memoirs of a Manx Maidenwolf_ ) and her brow was furrowed tightly and there was a knot behind her jaw. Imani lay down curled against her backpack with her head on her sweater and tried to listen into the wind and the city-sound and the grass and faraway the rain, and the mountains moving inside the earth, the hills, and the sound, and the sound… 

\--

She woke up at the sound of a fire engine siren on the street to the East, looking at the condom wrapper she’d floated away across the grass. It had blown back toward the blanket on the soft seabreeze. Flora’s book was resting open beside her and she’d taken out a box of chocolate frogs Imani hadn’t known she’d had and had finished them. Flora’s sweatshirt was draped over her neatly and thoughtfully. But Flora herself was gone. 

Of bloody course, Imani thought. She sat up and checked her watch. She’d slept maybe two hours. “Of bloody course,” she said aloud. She checked the chocolate frog box to make sure it was empty. 

The way two-hour naps treated you when you hadn’t slept in a while was like masturbating in the midst of a horrific sex draught, Imani reasoned; it was a kind of a bare and momentary relief that reminded you of all you weren’t getting. She stood on the blanket to stretch, knees cracking, eyes and brain feeling gummy, mouth and nose dry and tasting bad, and in doing so she saw Flora across the lawn by the reservoir smoking a cigarette with someone. A witch, Imani could tell. She wore a long black leather jacket over a white tulle dress, vaguely bridal, though even from across the lawn Imani could see the cigarette burns in it. And clunky acid-green Doc Martens.

Imani put her shoes on and went over. The girl’s name was Alex and she played in a grunge band called Crucia. “Nice,” Imani said. Alex said she’d been inspired to play in a band after seeing the Hobgoblins in Seattle in ’86 and realizing that all wizarding music wasn’t necessarily shit. Crucia were playing a show that night and Alex had already invited Imani and Flora to come to the gig for free and subsequently stay over in the spare room in the house she shared with a bandmate and some others, which Flora had apparently accepted despite her previously expressed desire to leave America as soon as possible at whatever cost. As they spoke Imani thought she remembered half-waking from her nap in the fine breeze sometime in the middle of it to the feeling of Flora stroking her hair. But perhaps it had been a dream.

They walked to Alex’s in the quiet wet streets and at her little yellow gingerbread-looking house she made them tea and they sat out on the front porch and had a joint. “What’s happening,” Alex said, at last, a little nervously. “With the band, I mean.” 

“Our band?” 

“Yes, of course.” In the resultant silence she blurted, clearly embarrassed, “I mean, that is, you don’t have to tell me — ” 

“It’s over,” Imani said, exhausted, “almost certaintly.” She didn’t think she’d said it aloud before. Beside her she felt Flora tense in the shoulder. “Ras will forgive Jack — ”

“He shouldn’t,” said Flora. 

“ — but he will. But Jack won’t forgive Ras. And neither of us will forgive either of them. So really it’s doomed. And it’s because of all our stubbornness. But that was why we were so good to begin with.” 

“How so?” 

“That,” Flora said, meaning the whole endeavor, meaning eight fucking years, “was the sound of four people fighting tooth and nail with noise only in a tiny room for hours over who topped.” 

Alex laughed, but then she looked like she regretted it. 

“Jack is a better songwriter and knows it,” Imani attempted to explain. “But Ras has this magic thing. It’s because he’s crazy. It’s like a radio tuner through which he receives celestial transmissions. And then Flora and I — ”

“Your songs were always my favorites on the records.” 

“Thank you. It was really just — we had to make it so that they couldn’t do it without us. We were terrified we were going to end up those girls in the ‘Addicted to Love’ video. That was what we were in every band we’d each been in before, basically.” 

“That’s why the last record was so hard,” Flora said. She was looking above Alex’s head at the gentle breeze in the tall pines, the sharp blue sky, in which nothing moved. “None of us had it in us to fight anymore after everything. All we had left was spite really. We each sort of gave up one by one. Jack brought in, like, the most unimaginably objectively perfect songs you’ve ever heard, recorded to cassette, a total hideous mess. And he said, which he never would’ve been caught dead saying not eighteen months previous, you can just do whatever you like with them. So that was when I knew it was over.” 

Imani’s heart had started aching and she wanted to rest her head on Flora’s knee or something but Alex was looking at them as though they had confessed to a double murder. Imani wondered if she already regretted bringing them home. “No one ever wants to hear us talk about it,” she said, in poor attempt at salvage. “So you’ll have to pardon us. Probably we need therapy.” 

“It’s alright,” Alex said. She was blushing a little high across her cheekbones and the color made her eyes seem greener and deeper like still water growing algae. “I probably need therapy too about my band. It just feels like, you know, intimate things… things I shouldn’t know.” 

“Tell us some gossip about your scene then,” said Flora. She pressed the last ember of the joint out under the toe of her boot. 

“Not much to say, you know, everyone’s fucking each other, and as many of our kind are addicted to unicorn blood as there are Muggle grunge musicians addicted to heroin… which is a lot I guess.” 

“I didn’t even know there were unicorns in America.” 

“There are actually a lot out in the rainforest. I’ve seen them before. I don’t know how people can go and kill them.” 

“People will do a lot to feel good when they feel bad,” said Flora diplomatically. She was still looking up at the still unmoving sky. “People will do anything except face what the problem really is.” 

Imani shivered. She wondered momentarily (it was the weight and significance of the pot, which was potent) if she was still asleep in the park and dreaming. Or if she was still asleep in their flat in Camden Town and dreaming. And if when she opened her eyes Flora would be out in the front room absently playing bass whilst watching telly in one of her frilly vintage nightgowns looking as Flora usually did when Imani was happiest and most blindly blindingly in love with her like that Big Star song: _I saw you you had on blue jeans your eyes couldn't hide anything…_ _like Saint Joan doing a cool jerk_ … And if eventually Ras would Floo and tell them to come over to play some new songs. 

\--

The show that night was in a warehouse behind a gas station on Pike Street three blocks from Alex’s. Imani had managed to sleep about two fitful sharp-dreaming hours more on the couch whilst Flora was out at the record shops and Alex was rehearsing before the gig and then she had wandered in the cool and fragrant breezy evening up to 15th Avenue to watch the sun set behind the mountains. She wanted a cigarette but hadn’t felt like she could ask Flora for one and was analyzing what this meant. Far off against the end of the continent the sun had cast a gradient of light above-against the shadow of the Olympics which appeared like a torn-off ridge of paper. Buses went by and men on bicycles and shiftless wanderers. She bummed a cigarette from one of these and then she walked down the hill toward Broadway in the last dregs of the light. 

Flora was already at the venue with a 40 of malt liquor in a brown paper bag talking with a tall girl who turned out to be Crucia’s bassist and also, they later learned, Alex's ex. She had some coke which the three of them snorted together in the alley while the first band played not necessarily terribly but boringly inside. The girl said some very nice things about Imani’s drumming and Imani thanked her but she was distracted by Flora’s regarding her with an uncertain pride and by the kind of white-noise rubbing in her ears. She didn’t remember the last time they had been to a show. Perhaps the last had been their own last show. The insomnia had screwed up time. Suddenly she royally didn’t want to be there, and it seemed it would be unbearable. Her heart was slamming through her whole body like — bigger than a drum. Perhaps an earthquake. She excused herself and went inside thinking she would lock herself in the bathroom for a while. But Alex intercepted her before she got there. The big soft green eyes a little wired but full of concern. “Alright?” She had to shout in Imani’s ear over the sound of the band. 

“I haven’t done coke in like — anyway just a mild panic attack.” 

“We should go outside and get — ”

“No, I just came from there — with Flora and what’s her name. Your bassist.” 

“Mercedes. Let’s go up to Marsden’s room then.” 

Alex urged her up a rickety wooden ladder and through a moth-eaten thrift store curtain into a room lit with hovering magical lights and spelled for silence. There was a person of indeterminable or nonexistent gender in there mixing something in a cauldron. They looked at Imani with absolutely no surprise. “Are you alright?” 

“Too much coke.” 

Alex’s hands were on Imani’s shoulders. “Do you have some of that — what was that stuff you gave me that one time — ” 

“Essence of thimbleberry. Yeah. Hold on — you should lie down.” 

Imani did. The bed was soft and she shut her eyes. Her heart was trying to burst out of her through her chest. “I don’t even know, you know, maybe it wasn’t too much coke and I’m just scared shitless.” 

“Why would you be scared,” said Alex gently. 

“Why wouldn’t I be fucking scared. I don’t know. I think the last show I went to was the one where my band broke up spectacularly and afterward we all almost died. And Flora fucking hates me now. And I don't know even who I am — what was the point of the eight bloody years then…” 

“You’re thinking too much too quickly,” Alex said. “Probably it’s just too much coke.” 

“It could’ve been cut with something,” Marsden said. “That’s been happening a lot lately. Can you sit up and have a glass of water?” 

Imani did but she didn’t dare open her eyes. Someone’s hand was on her shoulder. The water had a sweet dusty earthy bite to it she’d never tasted before. “The whole thing,” Marsden said. 

“What else is — ”

“I just put moly in everything since — you know. And some chamomile.” 

“Mars is our potions whiz,” said Alex kindly, trying to change the subject. 

“Flora was ours,” Imani said. “She saved Jack’s life. She invented this overdose reversal potion.” 

“For unicorn blood?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Could she teach me?” 

“Probably. You should ask her. She isn’t — she thinks all antidote potions recipes should be public domain. It’s her big philanthropic cause, that. She made it in our bathtub — it was beautiful blue.” Now she felt like she couldn’t stop talking. “I remember there was moly in it. I know you said there’s some in this.” 

“Someone cut heroin with baneberry powder last year and four people died,” Alex said. “We all have moly around since then because it breaks enchantment.” 

“I have a bezoar too,” Marsden said. “Don’t tell anyone.” 

“How’d you get that?” 

“It was in Wray’s things.” 

“Why would he’ve — ” Alex started. But then she stopped. 

It was a wide open wound between the two of them in the room and Imani could feel it. “It’s a nightmare,” she said, like to soothe them. Already she could feel whatever Marsden had given her calming first her heart than her head. “It’s an utter nightmare to play in a band. It’s like the normal pain and suffering of the human condition on acid and methedrine at once.” 

“Especially now,” Alex said. “So much death.” 

“Do you ever wonder why?” 

“People have always gone to fucked extremes to escape the pressure of fame.” 

“Have they?” 

“Sir Leighton Von Freyling — the most famous wizarding composer — he was addicted to unicorn blood and he was known to snort aconite powder…” 

“He also drank vampire semen — ”

“That’s a slanderous rumor,” said Alex. But she and Marsden were both laughing. Somewhere in her most conscious brain Imani knew it was funny, but she couldn’t articulate why, and she couldn’t laugh. “People will do anything,” Alex went on, more seriously now, “anything to escape. We see it all the time. The Muggles too.” 

“There’s needles everywhere,” Imani said, “all over this country in the cracks in the sidewalks.” 

“Do you feel better?” asked Marsden, clearly desperate to change the subject. Imani opened her eyes and beheld them. Alex had sat in the decaying stuffing-bursting leather armchair by the bed and was filtering through some obscure potions publication photocopied on shitty newsprint. The soft floating lights cast them both in pale fluttering flattering pastel and they both looked unfathomably lovely and unspeakably haunted to Imani’s bruised mind. 

“Better,” Imani said, meaning it only some. Alex touched her forehead and her rings were cold. There was something magical and practiced she had put in her touch to soothe; Imani could feel it. 

\--

She lay in Marsden’s bed a while longer while Crucia set up and she thought perhaps she slept. But she was summoned back to consciousness or another breed of dream by a squall of shocking feedback from the main room that broke even through Marsden’s meticulous silencing charms. Somewhat bewilderedly Imani stood and put her shoes back on feeling dry-mouthed from the coke and the nap, and she drained the glass of water (spiked with more chamomile this time, plus some lavender) Marsden had left on the bedside table, then she went out through the hanging curtain and sat on the top of the ladder looking out over the floor space. Flora was in the front row, eyes wandering, she caught sight of Imani and the flicker of relief across her face dissolved in frustration, or perhaps grief. Imani’s stomach and chest wrung each other like a wet towel and she almost got up to go back into Marsden’s room. But then Crucia played another strike of elastic, effervescent noise and floored her utterly. 

The band had assembled on the floor surrounded by a rough ritualistic fairy ring of bewitched, humming amplifiers and young witches and wizards in similar dark flannel tones. Alex had changed her clothes somewhat; she wore a black velvet gown she’d chopped off at mid-calf and which was fraying around the jagged hem in ribbons of soft fabric. The only colors to her were the green Doc Martens and her guitar, which was a possessed fluorescent purple, and from which she was evincing a protracted mourning wail. Marsden had set up a roll on their cymbal, shattering it occasionally with sharp hits to the snare, face set like a trap and void of expression. Mercedes played a creeping psychedelic line up and down the fretboard of her white Rickenbacker bass, swaying, eyes closed, in a seeming trance. But Alex’s eyes were locked across the stage at the only member of the band Imani hadn’t met yet. He was tall with an unfashionable haircut and thick glasses; he was dressed as though he had come from an office job, though he had untucked his button-up green flannel shirt and cuffed the sleeves. One of the elbows had ripped through showing an array of old scabs. Most of the noise, Imani realized, was his, and he was fighting with it almost like a snake charmer. There was a peacefulness to his face even as he slammed his fist against the body of the guitar and it made a clattering falling sound like a hutch of dishes shoved over onto a tile floor. He did it again, bending the neck of the guitar toward the sound, and a shiver passed up Imani’s spine. Then Marsden’s measured introduction broke into all-out holy violence. 

They were the most astounding wizarding band Imani had seen since the early Crushing Valerian sets at Poveglia in 1984. Alex was pretty if odd-looking away from the mic but in performance she was incredibly magnetic. Her hair was in her mouth and struck in the sweat on her forehead and she seemed to only stand on her toes even and especially when she sang or screamed or played bleeding-sounding whammy-heavy guitar solos. Her lyrics when Imani could make them out through the maelstrom centered her femaleness, sex, death; in one song she shouted over and over again, _cold, cold, cold, cold, cold_ , over a squalling guitar pitch from the tall boy, and Imani could tell just from the sound it was about the coldness of death, and she thought she might cry. 

The bass and drums locked a groove in that the guitars and vocals tried to press into and crack like freezing water. But it couldn’t crack. Marsden was an unshakeable drummer, Imani thought, watching their elbows fly. As Flora had so adeptly told Alex even in the Hobgoblins’ most democratic moments (eg. during the writing of _Erebus and Terror_ ) it had felt like a kind of orgiastic fight to death or consummation in hell itself. This felt cooperative by necessity — out of hurt. Like when they had wounded each other they had stopped and moved on. They had learned from it and tried to heal. It sounded less like infighting and more like they had banded together to fight something larger. Wartime music. Imani envied them, horribly, immeasurably guiltily. She had the feeling she wouldn’t if she knew the whole story, and indeed, when she knew, she didn’t. The guitarist performed these spells on his instrument wandlessly and wordlessly that Imani had never heard before; she doubted even Jack or Ras knew they existed. The sound was huge and impossible and seemed to take physical form. And in it, Alex’s vocals, calling in the darkness, shaping it into a uniform, almost indiscriminate condemnation. “Fuck this blood,” she screamed at one point, over no rhythm at all but feedback, her guitar on the floor with her heavy green shoe pressed over the strings, “fuck this blood, drain this blood…” 

At the end of the set the silence was startling and shell-shocked, the claps and cheers bewildered and strange. Imani climbed down from the loft and went to Flora, who was removing the sound-dampening charms from her ears. Each of them nearly said something but stopped. What could be said? Finally Flora just asked, “Alright?” 

“Yeah. Too much coke earlier.” 

“Strong stuff.” 

“Marsden had some funny tonic they gave me. I said you’d teach them the overdose reversal potion.” 

“I need to invent one for heroin,” said Flora. “Anyway I don’t know if I remember it all off the top of my head. I have the recipe at home.” 

It seemed they would talk about everything besides the set. To the extent that they went outside to the alley for a smoke and Imani said, “I hate American cigarettes.” 

“Agreed. They’re either tasteless or they’re like battery acid.” 

“You like nothing at all about this whole country.” 

“Not true. I like the view from this city.” 

We could go out there, Imani almost said, tried to say. we could go out into the mountains, we could never come out again — we could find where this sound comes from and throw ourselves into it as into some endless river — but she didn’t say anything at all because shortly thereafter the guitarist came out with a 40 and his instrument in a soft case on his back, followed by Alex, who was similarly outfitted, except also with a joint in her mouth. The guitarist’s name, she said, beamingly, putting the joint in Flora’s mouth (she tried for Imani’s first, but seemed to think better of it), was Graeme Sugarbush. “We met on the ferry to Bainbridge cutting class when we were at Denny Academy.” 

“There’s a resonant circle in the woods out there,” said Graeme Sugarbush drunkenly. 

“This is Flora and Imani, Graeme,” said Alex. 

“I know.” He shook their hands. His grip was loose and clammy. “I thought it was a dream. Alex didn’t tell me you’d be here.” 

“I just found out early today and you were at work till the very last second as usual. He works for his father,” Alex said. 

“Doing what?” 

“Data entry,” said Graeme. 

“Sugarbush is the oldest name in the wizarding Northwest,” said Alex. Not quite proudly. So here, Imani thought, was the rift, exactly where it always was… 

“I’ve thought about changing it. But I like how it shocks people.” 

“Does your family know you’re in a band like this?” 

“I’m actually not sure…” 

They sat together for a while talking and eventually were joined by Marsden and Mercedes and they shared the 40 and finished Alex’s joint and another drawn from the pocket of her leather coat, listening to the sounds from the Muggle bars on the street. “We could go to Linda’s,” said Graeme after a while. He stretched his long legs out. It seemed to Imani he was looking up at the full moon kind of longingly. 

“I don’t want to hang out with the Muggles,” Alex said. 

“They’re alright.” 

“They are alright. But not tonight.” She yawned and turned to Imani and Flora. “Do you all listen to much of the Muggle music from over here?” 

“From Seattle specifically? All of us like Nirvana.” 

“And Bikini Kill.” 

“We could take you down to Olympia if you want,” said Marsden. “There are great wizarding bands there too.” 

“If they’re anywhere near as good as you all…” 

“Better,” said Mercedes. 

“So you did like it,” said Alex beamingly. 

“Dearly so,” Imani told them. “It was astounding. Harrowing. I thought it was going to kill me, Graeme, those spells on your guitar. What even were they?” 

“I’ve invented most of them… they're modifications on _Detorqueo, Flecto_ , just like, twist, or distort, but it’s all in the way you feel it, basically — I’m hopeless at teaching them to people.” 

“It’s quite abstract,” Alex said. Her hand had alit on his shoulder like a pale beringed moth. “He’s utterly brilliant.” 

Graeme looked into the 40 embarrassedly. “Alex writes the songs.” 

“They’re hell of songs, Alex,” Flora said. 

“What’s that one where you’re yelling, cold cold cold — ”

“‘Grave Dirt,’ it’s called.” 

She told them (a little obliquely, Imani thought) about the process of writing it with additions from the rest of the band, and Imani watched the animation of her face and hands, her bright and happy eyes, the sweat at her hairline in the fluorescent streetlight. Marsden’s occasional laughter, which seemed rare, Mercedes’ mellifluous stoned giggling; they were possessed by the success of the show and riding high on it, Imani could feel it like a sort of fluorescent golden thread that bound the four of them. 

She knew the point, the whole delicious hell, of playing in a band was the fact it was a sort of apotheosis of relationships. A deep, vulnerable openness to one another’s creativity, pain, brilliance, innermost souls — and the Hobgoblins had been special because it had been two relationships that had had to bleed into one here and there but which could not be violated. A central, vital push and pull as between two nations, two unified fronts. This was different. It seemed more organic but later Imani learned it was born out of four people’s love for a fifth person who was gone. Both came from an impossible woundedness. She wasn’t sure which was worse. 

\--

In the morning Imani and Flora crept, attempting silence, out of the spare room they’d been allotted in the house (Mercedes and Alex were asleep in their rooms and Graeme, who had been too drunk to walk home to his parents’, was passed out diagonally across the pull-out couch with his shoes and all his clothes and his jacket still on) and walked down to the bank of payphones they’d seen the night before at the gas station by the warehouse where the show had been. Imani left Flora to call the airport looking for tickets home to London while she went to pick up coffees at a shop Alex had pointed out and she took her time walking back, dreading something she couldn’t put her finger on, studying all the Muggle show flyers hung in bar windows mostly for gigs that had already passed. The streets were quiet and washed with dew and rain and a few homeless kids sleeping in doors and awnings stirred and watched Imani go by. 

At the phone bank Flora had rested her forehead against the top of the box. Her eyes were closed and she was biting the inside of her lip the way she did when she was trying not to snap. “I under— yes. I understand that,” she said delicately into the receiver. “Of course.” 

The voice through the phone was tinny and small saying something about extenuating circumstances. Imani balanced the coffees on top of one another stabilizing them with a bit of silent magic so she could touch Flora’s shoulder sympathetically. Flora didn’t so much twitch away as she moved entirely out of Imani’s touch, and Imani thought about throwing one of the coffees on the ground. Instead she sat defeatedly on the curb and lit a cigarette. 

Flora slammed the payphone down in the receiver. “It’ll have to be next week unless we want to pay more than a thousand dollars each.” 

“Well we can afford it if you’re really so miserable.” 

“It’s ridiculous to spend so much money on a one-way flight. And I am not miserable.” 

“Oh my God. You don’t have to fake it with me. You can hardly fake it anyway.” 

“How so do you mean,” said Flora. Not really a question. She was trying to collect her voice, like dropped coins. 

Imani got up, knees cracking. She found she couldn’t really stomach the taste of her cigarette anymore but couldn’t bear to put it out. She needed something, she thought, in her hands. “You’d rather be anywhere but here,” she told Flora, “with anyone but me. You can’t fake it, you can’t pretend you aren't utterly bloody miserable. That’s how I mean.” 

“And you aren’t miserable?” 

“I am a little but — we’re in a wonderful city with wonderful music and wonderful hospitable friends. Why not try — ” 

“Where did you go last night?” 

“What?” 

“Where’d you go? At the gig.” 

“Up to Marsden’s room. I told you. Too much coke. I had a bloody panic attack existential crisis about how horrible you’ve been to me, if you must know.” 

“Existential crisis,” Flora said, in a dark, coldly amused way. She kicked a stone across the sidewalk. 

“I don’t even know who I’m supposed to be anymore, you know, without the band, without — how it used to be with you and me.” 

“I get it. I feel the same.” 

“Then why don’t you ever talk to me about it?” 

Flora met her eyes with a kind of brutal, almost regretful daring. She tried the question, the shape of it, several times before she said it: “Don’t you ever worry we stayed together for the wrong reasons?” 

Something in Imani’s gut tightened and froze and shattered like dry ice. “What?” 

“Did we do this because we really wanted to, I mean. Jesus, Mani, it’s been eight bloody years.” 

“I know, of course I know that.” 

“Well do you ever think we only — maybe we shouldn’t’ve. We got dragged into this and then we had to.” 

“What do you — we shouldn’t’ve — ”

“Look at us. Now we’re without it and it isn’t working without it. And so I wonder.” 

“It’s just — it’s a shock. It’s getting accustomed to — everything’s different now isn’t it.” 

“But it’s been eight months now.” 

“And that was eight years. It doesn’t just become normal. We’ve never had to work at it before is what you mean. It was always sort of a given because we needed each other so badly in all that.” 

“And now we don’t; is that what you mean?” 

“It’s just different, it’ll have to be different.” 

“I don’t know how.” 

“Neither do I.” 

“Maybe it can’t be different.” 

“Maybe. Flor, Jesus.” 

“What?” 

“Don’t you love me?” 

“Yeah. I’ve never loved anybody more in my whole life. But maybe it isn’t enough.” 

“How could it not be enough?” 

“Like you said. We needed each other so badly and now, you know, we just, we don’t anymore. There isn’t any — fucking behemoth we’re up against. There’ll never be again. No kind of trial by fire. It’s just us now.” 

It was precisely what, Imani thought, with mounting horror, she had always longed for when it was at its worst. _God, please let us just be alone_ … “We have to make something new,” she said, “together. That’s the only — ”

“What do you mean, make something new.” 

“I don’t know. Music maybe, again. The two of us.” 

“You really want that? I thought I was miserable to be around.” 

“You won’t be — Flor. Isn’t it worth trying?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it is. Sometimes I feel like we should just leave it — leave everything.” 

“Well, we can’t, short of Obliviating each other. The only way out is through. Into something new. It’s the only way.” 

“If it can’t be that way — ”

“Then it — Flora. I can’t, I don’t want to fight with you any more like this.” 

“Just, you know, just say it.” 

“If it can’t — bloody hell. Then I guess probably, it would have to be, to be over.” 

“Okay. Thank you.” 

“Fuck you. I don’t want it, I couldn’t stand it to end like that. We need to, don’t you feel it, we have to try. Can’t you stand to fucking try.” 

“I am,” Flora said, “I am, Imani, I am trying. And I have been.” 

“Then bloody act like it.” 

She crouched and picked up her coffee and turned away from Flora. It felt like the strands of a garment tearing. “Where the fuck are you going?” Flora called from behind her. Her voice hurt more than anything else and something about it made Imani feel vengeful — like digging her fingernails into the wound of it. 

“For a walk.” 

“Where?” 

“I don’t know.” 

Flora called her name after her once and then again but Imani kept walking. Eventually, though she had heavy boots on, she ran, up the mounting hill, lungs burning, hot coffee spilling over her hand. At the top of the hill on 17th Avenue she sat heavily in a doorway gasping for breath and cried. After about twenty minutes someone came out of the doorway and asked if she was okay. 

She got up and walked all the way down Madison Street to the park on Lake Washington at the end of it. Already there were a few Muggle families on the grassy beach outfitting their children in flotation devices and water wings and slathered-on sunscreen. Far and away across the water Mount Rainier seemed to surface from the lake and the forest and the hills like a floating conical cloud. She went in the locker room and took her tights off from under her shorts and waded into the lake up to her thighs watching the hills and the mountains lose focus in the developing haze. Then she sat in the grass and took her notebook out from her bag and began to write. 

She left the park in the afternoon when she had written through the entire notebook to the last page. It took her a few hours to walk back to Alex’s because she kept getting lost and when she arrived Graeme was on the porch smoking a joint. “Are you alright?” he said when he saw her face. 

“Not really. You?” 

“Not really.” 

He passed her the joint. “Have you seen Flora,” she asked. 

“She went out with Alex and Mercedes to Linda’s. I’m going to go by in a little while if you want to come.” 

“Not tonight. You can take me another time.” She passed the joint back to him and he rubbed the ember out in Alex’s overflowing ashtray then tucked it in the pocket of his green flannel shirt. “You know, I was going to ask you for a favor.” 

“Anything.” 

She’d had the idea walking back from Lake Washington past the university arboretum. “Have you got camping stuff?” 

“My parents do and they never use it. And they have this great guidebook — I was obsessed with it as a kid. _Great Wizarding Adventures of the Northwest_. It’s got all sorts of information in it — Apparition points and mushroom spots and the locations of secret blinds for spotting unicorn herds and the like.” 

“Do you think they’d let me borrow it? The book and the tent and everything?” 

“They don’t have to know. I’m going back there tonight. I can bring it here tomorrow afternoon.” 

“That’d be — you’d be saving my life. Thank you.” 

“Don’t mention it. I think everybody who comes to visit Seattle should go out into the woods. Did you take magical theory at school?” 

“Yeah, it was a requirement where I went.” 

“There’s so much resonance out there. You can feel resonance right?”

“Almost always.” 

“Mercedes can’t at all usually but she can out there. It’s incredible. It’s where everything comes from.” He smiled at her, which felt like a rare gift. Like a secret he was sharing. She realized, rather belatedly, he was only twenty-one years old. “It feels like a whole ocean under you. Even as you can see the whole ocean and you can see fucking Canada. And it’s a feeling — you understand why people believe in God. And you understand that the earth is alive and that your life is very short. And all your pain is like, one single perfect cello note in an entire symphony.” 

“That’s lovely, Graeme.” 

“It’s this weed Alex has got, really… I’m not a poet.” 

“Do you write your own songs? Outside the band I mean?” 

Graeme shrugged. “Not anymore.” 

Imani left it there. They spoke for a while longer on the stoop and Imani told Graeme about backpacking in the Himalayas and Eastern Europe, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Australian desert, the isolate rural cities of China desolate bus rides apart in the still and silent karst hills. Graeme told her about the ferry boat to Alaska through the fjords and the islands, the Okanagan plains of Washington and British Columbia, driving in the hills in Western Idaho, the Rockies, the abandoned nuclear city Hanford to the south, and the long curving flatwormish lakes to the east over the mountains, the fields, the mountains and the waterfalls, the pines, the needling rain out of the heavy and motionless low cotton-grey clouds, the silence like no other silence, and the sense that you could walk too far into the forest and find another time, another place, a gaping mouth, a door — the very end, or the beginning. And Imani thought, listening to him, if Flora wanted to go home she could go into the wilderness alone and find it all herself. England be damned. 

When it was starting to get dark Graeme got up and cracked his back and said he really had better go to Linda’s. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” 

“Yeah. I’m sure.” 

He said he’d see her tomorrow with the camping stuff and left through the swinging creaky gate. Imani went inside and made a cup of tea and some toast and looked through Alex’s record collection and watched some dismal Muggle news for a while and eventually she sat on the pulled-out couch in silence staring into space attempting, she told herself, some variety of meditation. At last she went into the spare room where Alex had put her and Flora and lay down. Her feet ached and her shins from running in the heavy boots and the dusk light and breeze in the pines through the window felt musical and soporific but still it took her seemingly forever to fall asleep. Her dreams were roving and fitful and she woke from them with starts imagining she felt someone sitting on the end of the bed only to find there was no one there. 

At last she dreamed she was with Flora in some green room somewhere but it was made of trees, and Flora was holding her with a shocking, unfamiliar sweetness. She could feel Flora’s nose against her neck and the cool touch of Flora’s necklaces and rings against her skin and she could smell Flora’s old-lady perfume and her dust, her hair, old roses, and against her body she felt Flora breathing. She struggled forth from this dream with difficulty as though emerging from quicksand, and when she managed it was nearly dawn. It seemed that sometime in the night the dream had actualized itself; Flora was with her in the bed, arm around her belly and hand fisted in her shirt, holding her desperately tight, ponderous breath against her shoulder reeking of tequila. 

\--

The pale midmorning came through onto the bed through the blinds and the trees shifting when the wind blew. Imani watched the light move in the blankets for a while and then she got up, careful not to wake Flora, and dressed out of her backpack on the floor. She took the book she was reading — Kesey’s _Sometimes a Great Notion —_ and went out into the living room. There was a pot of coffee bewitched to stay warm in the kitchen and once she had poured a mug and added ample cream and sugar she went outside intending to sit on the porch and read alone for a while. But Alex was out there, in a silk robe over torn leggings, listening to Saint Etienne on her bewitched walkman whilst looking through the underground wizarding paper _Smoke and Mirrors,_ in which the show at the warehouse two nights previous had been reviewed. The photographer had captured her snarling at the mic, hair in her face, eyes possessed. In the background Marsden’s drumsticks were a raging blur. A second photograph showed Graeme toward the end of the set having spelled his guitar such that it literally bent. “Lovely pictures,” Imani said, sitting down. 

Alex moved a hand through her hair. Her brow was furrowed tightly with painful nostalgia or a hangover and in the soft light she looked very young, but also like she had lived through a thousand lifetimes. “The review is alright,” she said, “they said the newer songs sound like something’s missing. Which is, tell me something I don’t know. I really shouldn’t read our press.” 

“It’s hard not to. Flora and I went cold turkey after the first album came out. But it was different because they never talked about us anyway. And if they did Jack and Ras thought it was hilarious and would tell us all about it.” 

“It’s hardly ever about any of us either,” said Alex. “It’s about the looming spectre.” 

“Drugs?” 

“Yes, drugs sort of embodied in a person… Wray, who got the band together. I forgot, I told Flora, but I didn’t tell you. I just assume everybody knows. Everybody in Seattle certainly treats us like reliquaries of his ashes or something.” 

“What happened?” 

“He died in October. Not even a year ago. An overdose, but. He left a note.” 

“Alex. I’m so sorry.” 

“Thank you, I guess. It’s alright. I know he would’ve wanted us to carry on. It’s just — when they say something’s missing, of course it is. It’s missing on purpose. We leave things out to leave space for him because it isn’t — it’s his band. It’s still his band. But I don’t know how much longer it can last.” 

“How so do you mean?” 

“It feels like dominos, you know. Like he was the first.” 

“And then — ”

“Graeme drinks too much,” said Alex. It felt like a sort of blunt sledgehammer blow, Imani thought, to hear his name — after their stoned laughter on the porch the previous evening — in the context of imminent death. “And he makes bad decisions when he’s drunk,” Alex went on, “which of course he usually is. And so sometimes I feel like it’s only a matter of time. Like all my worry displaced itself from Wray when he died but then it had to go somewhere else. Because other things had to displace themselves from Wray too.” 

“They were close? Graeme and Wray I mean?” 

“Yes, very close. They were in the same year together at Denny Academy. The note he left was for Graeme. I only know what was in it ‘cause he told me. You want a cigarette?” 

“Sure.” 

Alex took the pack out of the pocket of her silk robe and tapped it against the table to settle the tobacco. “Anyway, I know you know what it’s like. Playing these songs over and over again and having them — the extent to which they live inside your brain. Like a ghost. It’s going to kill us all. But we can’t stop. I know you know — ”

“Yes. I know,” Imani said. Alex passed her a cigarette and her silver carven lighter. “I think I was trying to tell you the other night. Who even knows what we are without it — without the ghost. Everything I do for the rest of my life will be haunted. And all of us are still alive or pieces of us are I guess.” 

“That’s why,” Alex said. Emphatically she wouldn’t look at Imani. “With you and Flora.” 

“Yes. That’s why. Before this — the band happened while we happened. So I don't know what we have without the band.” 

“Well, the two of you write songs together, don’t you?” 

“Not anymore. And we only ever really wrote songs together for the Hobgoblins. We left — like you do. We left space. They were sketches, like, for all of us to finish together.” 

“Do you think you’ll ever get the band back together?”

“No. It’ll kill Jack or Ras or both of them. I wouldn’t ever do it again, for their sakes.” 

“You’d lose what you have with Flora for them?” 

“If it can’t be for me and Flora without the band then — perhaps it’s for the best. I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. We had a hell of a fight yesterday.” 

“I know. She told us last night.” 

“I’m sure she made me out to be the bad one.” 

“Not as much as you might expect. Mostly she was hurt you walked away.” 

This was almost comically ridiculous to such an extent Imani ignored it. “We agreed that if we can’t make music together — if we can’t create together again then it's not worth it. And it's over.” 

“You could use our practice space if you want to try. It’s just a few blocks from here.” 

“I feel like — I want to do it but I can’t do it. Then the decision’s made. I’d just rather not know.” 

“You’d rather go on like this?” 

“Almost. I don’t even know — Alex. Who I am without her. I mean I barely know who I am without Jack and Ras. I’d rather cling onto this memory of this feeling and wishfully — and just hope and pray it could happen again with us than maybe, you know, never feel it — ” 

She was cut off by Alex’s mouth on her mouth. At first her brain didn’t entirely process that it was a kiss. She had kissed no one but Flora in eight years and Alex’s kissing was different and softer. Her bewitched Walkman was playing Saint Etienne’s cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” at such a pitch that the atmospheric synthesized strings sounded as though they were moving on the breeze. Alex touched her knuckles inside Imani’s knee and Imani leaned into it and into the kiss and Alex’s teeth shifted across her lip. The dappled light through the pines caught brilliantly in Alex’s silk robe and Imani reached for her shoulder and pulled her closer almost in a kind of desperate yearning fascination because it didn’t really feel like anything at all. Something about it was conversational in a pathetic way, and she was certain for the first time of the exact mechanics of a kiss, and she was thinking, with a growing horror, how every kiss she’d had before, and certainly every kiss for the last eight years, must have had a sort of magic in it that she hadn’t noticed…

Alex shifted her hand further up inside Imani’s knee and Imani pulled away. Breeze, stillness, silence. Across the street the neighbor’s wind chimes were ringing softly and the Saint Etienne song had reached its shuffled dubby finish. “Sorry,” said Alex. Her face was flushed across her high cheekbones. 

“No, I’m sorry.” 

“You couldn’t — it’s just. You shouldn’t feel like she’s the only person in the world.” 

But she is, Imani wanted to say, and you just proved to me, incontrovertibly, she is… She couldn’t meet Alex’s eye. Carefully, trying to be surreptitious about it, she touched her mouth. Maybe you had to want for there to be magic in a kiss… It came out of faith and out of certainty, out of will. Like a Patronus, or an Unforgivable Curse. 

“Graeme said you want to go out to the peninsula,” Alex went on. She looked embarrassed. 

“Flora wants desperately to go home. And I don’t.” 

“So that’s what you’d rather do to give up, then. Just run away.” Her voice was hurt now, like she was moving through stages of rejection at speed. 

“No. But — ” 

Alex stood up and brushed cigarette ash from her robe. “I’m going to get dressed and I’m going to get doughnuts,” she said, voice terse, mouth tight. “Graeme is coming by at noon with the camping stuff and he said he’ll bring you to the ferry. So you should decide by noon if you’re going to wreck your relationship by not dealing with your problems or if you’re going to go to the practice space and know for sure. Can you do that?” 

“I can. Alex — ”

“What.” 

“Just — I’m sorry.” 

“For what, for fuck’s sake.” 

“Just sorry. Just for everything.” 

Alex didn’t say anything. She gathered her walkman and her empty coffee mug and her packet of cigarettes and went in the house softly closing the door. But she left the copy of _Smoke and Mirrors_ , which Imani picked up, desperate for something to do with her hands. She opened to the page where the Crucia show had been reviewed and for a moment it overwhelmed her to look at the photographs of ferocious Alex and peaceful Graeme, possessed by magic and by loss, flashbulb casting their faces in sharp grieving shadow. She tore her eyes from them and read the blurb: 

_Crucia’s been one of Seattle’s best wizarding bands since their founding out of the ashes of Kelpies and Warlike Warlock in 1988, and they remain so even after the death of founding member Wray Thorne in October. Frontwoman Alex Robinson has taken over rhythm guitar duties whilst lead guitarist Graeme Sugarbush has somehow figured out how to make even more noise. The old songs, written with Wray, still sound full and vibrant, if necessarily rearranged, and maintain their intensity even with Alex’s notorious ferocity confined to mic range. Grief’s made them even heavier, even if their new material (sample song titles: “Grave Dirt,” “Mount Mazama,” “Papermill,” “The Prodigal”) feels somewhat like a puzzle missing a keystone piece. — Joe Montgomery, Associate Editor_

Imani thought she wanted to burn the paper to dust out of sheer vengeance. She wanted to march directly to the newspaper offices and hex the writer with incurable boils. How dare he, she was thinking, how bloody dare he… Instead she got up and went in the house leaving the door ajar and her book and coffee on the porch and went to the spare room where Flora was still asleep in the filtering patterning supple light through the blinds. She knelt on the edge of the bed and Flora moved painfully, evidently hungover, opening one bleary eye in her direction. 

“How’s your head.” 

“Mmph,” Flora said. 

Imani put her hand on Flora’s bare fever-warm shoulder and then she ran her fingers through Flora’s hair at the nape of her neck where she badly needed it cut. There was an Echo and the Bunnymen song stuck in her head: _hold me tight, to my logical limit_ , and she recalled the dream, and Flora’s holding her in the night; there’s something left, she almost said, tried to say, don’t you feel it, we have something left, and how dare anybody, even either of us, assume that we have nothing left… 

Instead she said, “Want to play music today?” 

Flora pressed her face into her pillow. “What,” she said, muffled, woozily. 

“Alex said we could use Crucia’s practice space.” 

Flora turned to her again. It seemed she could tell even in this state that this was a sort of ultimatum. “Yeah,” she said, softly, softer than she’d said anything in a long time, “yeah, I’d like that.” 

\--

On that terrible night, Flora brought Jack back to his place on Denman Road and came back to the venue to tell Imani what had happened en route to refill her supply of the overdose reversal potion at their place. “He’s gone and done it,” she said, appearing in a sudden snap-crack in the green room as Imani was rolling a lonely post-show joint. 

Imani’s entire heart and soul and most of her internal organs turned to coal in an instant of throttling pressure. “He’s — ” 

“I had the potion. I’ve brought him home. You’ve got to take care of Ras.” 

“Jesus fuck.” 

“He’ll be alright. This time at least. It worked. I’ve got to go home and get the second dose and bring it to Jack’s place. Can you bring Ras to Whyland’s?” 

“Sure — why Whyland’s?” 

“If you take him home he’ll leave immediately to kill what’s-his-name with his bare hands.” 

“Davis Rorschach,” said Imani, not knowing really how she knew it. “Do you think I should tell him?” 

“Who?” 

“Ras. That Jack — ”

“I wish we didn’t have to but I think we should. Wouldn’t do if he heard it from, you know, from someone else.” 

She noticed for the first time that there was just a little blood dried like an unfurling rose on Flora’s hands, in the webbing of her fingers. She looked almost extraordinarily tired. “Are you alright,” Imani said, pathetically, knowing the answer. 

“No, like, dearly no. Not whatsoever. Never again. Jesus Christ.” 

“Flor — ”

“How much longer do you think we can do this? How much longer can any of us do this?” 

“I don’t know. Not long.” 

At first, in ’84, she had thought it would end with some spectacular fight between Jack and Ras over “a girl” ie. each other. Then she had thought it would never end. Since ’88 or so she had been certain it would end with one of their deaths. Now it seemed that was nearest the truth and she thought she should’ve known it since even before it started. Since she had first heard their voices on the radio. 

She got up and embraced Flora tightly and Flora wilted a little in her arms and pressed her face into her neck and Imani could feel she had been crying. “I’ll meet you at home after,” she said. “Do you want anything?” 

“I want you to Obliviate me of this whole disaster.” 

She almost said, sure. Let’s go back to that moment in your bed at your shitty flat with pizza and Cabaret Voltaire when fate leapt upon us like some stalking predator… as though the only way out weren’t through…

Flora Apparated back to the flat where she kept the remaining supply of the potion in an old milk jug in the back of the closet and Imani went to Ras’s green room and rapped upon the door. When he saw her face his entire being shuttered or shattered. It was like nothing else she’d ever seen. Something inside him turned off. She took his wrist and it was like stepping into some region of evil resonance. Dragging, swarming, possessing madness. “Mani,” he said. Something in his voice like a warning tone but she couldn’t let go. 

“Flora’s got him,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm and measured, like talking to a wild animal. “He’s alright. We’re going to your sister’s.” 

“Flora’s — ”

“She’s invented this potion. It’s alright, he’s alright.” She didn’t know how alright and didn’t want to say anything more. She wondered about the alternate universe where Jack came to tell her instead. It was like a blow to the back of the skull. “We’re going to Whyland’s,” she said again. 

“I’m not,” Ras said. His eyes were huge. It was the only time, Imani later realized, she’d ever thought he could hurt her or anybody else but himself. “Absolutely fucking not.” 

“Ras — ”

“We’re going — Imani. Where did she take him.” 

“We’re going to your sister’s.” 

The necessary words were in the back of her throat howling as they had been for eight bloody years: _Fucking grow the backbone to love him all the time_. She was holding his wrist so tightly now it must have hurt, but probably he couldn't feel a thing at all. _We both had to for each other because you wouldn’t for him. So thank you, but also go fuck yourself_. 

She didn’t say anything. They Apparated to Whyland’s and Imani explained on the threshold in hushed tones. “Are you alright,” Whyland said around the door. 

“Yeah, I think. Almost. I’m not sure about Flora.” 

“I have — there’s legislation. I’m trying. That potion could be legal one day.” 

She was going to Apparate home but instead she walked to the tube. It was almost dawn. Belatedly she realized the thing clattering in her bag were her drumsticks which were smashed to hay toward the points of them. There was no one on the train but a kind of hauntedness and there was a rhythm in her head that was uncapturable which was perhaps her heartbeat or worse and after a while she realized she was crying. Once she realized it got worse. It was like a dull knife made of cold stone up through the soft underneath her chin through her brain and down through her throat into her chest. She pulled her knees up to her chest and pressed her face between them and screamed. 

She was trying to remember when she knew. Perhaps Flora had told her. Jack looked different. There was less of him and he laughed less. She’d thought for a long time that he was in a particularly bad sulk over some terrible thing or another that Ras had said. Which of course was true but which also bore the necessary caveat that he had decided to self-medicate this sulk with literally the worst possible fake panacea. 

Unicorn blood abuse epidemics happened sporadically in wizarding communities around the world and probably had in some form or another since the dawn of time according to the work of more liberal historians. When Imani had been at school in Ghana there had been one upcountry in Kumasi and a classmate two years ahead had died of an overdose on summer holiday. Of course it was all different from the academic understanding or even the more forgiving psychological one when it was someone one knew so closely and someone one had come to depend on for one’s livelihood and the actualization of one’s chief creative outlet. One’s only-other-person who understood sometimes what it felt like to look like one did and be loud in the late eighties in wizarding London. One’s dear friend, one’s dear friend’s dearest friend, one tangled motherfucking web, silver-blackening, bleeding… 

In Camden Town she climbed the stairs to the flat and all the lights were off and Flora was in the bed and Imani didn’t even take her shoes off before she lay down and pulled Flora into her arms. Outside a siren went by on the street. Flora’s heartbeat against her own heartbeat speeding clattering slamming one eternal rushing forever-sound. Imani kissed her. “It’s fucking over,” Flora said, voice ragged from crying, “it’s over, how can it go on?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t know, it has to.” 

“Does it?” 

“Yes,” Imani said, “yes, yes,” holding her face. Flora’s mascara had run streakily like black ink into the dark hollows under her eyes as though she were a player in some goth music video. “It has to go on. It has to.” 

It would go on, they nearly understood even then, limpingly, dragging itself, rather like a zombie, possessed, starved, mostly dead, for another two months, until it could go on no more, until it would quite literally crash and burn. And even then the spectre of it would rear its head probably for the rest of their lives. 

“I love you,” Imani said, “always, always, nothing else matters, okay?” 

“Okay — yes. And I you. Okay.” 

They were holding each other like the last survivors of a shipwreck afloat on some uncertain jetsam. She wanted to crawl inside Flora and never come out. Outside the dawn was coming in a shock of midnightish blue through the low clouds. It was hard to believe then that it would get worse.

\--

The practice space was dark and clammy-cold and the only lightbulbs in the lamps were red. To prevent suspicion most of the equipment was Muggle in nature but had been doctored with magic — amps and pedals and mics tweaked for sound quality and distortion — in ways you couldn’t tell unless you were looking for it. “Like four bands practice here,” Alex said, handing Imani the keys. “There’s beers in that box with a cooling charm on them and Graeme left his weed somewhere… probably by the keyboards. He also told me to tell you you can put your own spells on the guitars but not to use _finite incantatum_ on any of them. No one else should be coming in til noon tomorrow. Just lock up when you’re done.” 

“Cheers, Alex.” 

“Yeah.” She cocked her brow in Imani’s direction. “Good luck.” 

“What happened,” Flora said when the door had shut. They had had to take some time before coming over owing to her atrocious hangover. She crouched to inspect Mercedes’ white Rickenbacker bass propped against one of the amps and softly feeding back in the quiet humming static. 

Imani went and sat behind the drums feeling suddenly electric. “She kissed me this morning,” she said. “She really went for it.” 

“What’d you do?” 

“Kind of flashed out of it when she put her hand inside my thigh. I didn’t really feel anything and I think she could tell. And it hurt her.” 

“Yes well, who wouldn’t be hurt by that.” 

Imani found drumsticks and played the flourishing roll that opened Jack’s old song “Ritual Suicide.” It was like an old drug she hadn’t tried in a while. A pure and effervescent electrocution of joy.

“Bloody hell,” said Flora, “not that one. I forget it.” 

She had picked up Mercedes’s bass and put it on and was tuning it. Watching her was like mainlining deja vu. Imani sang the bass part back to her and Flora gamely attempted but had to quit, laughing. “What do you want to play?” Imani asked her. 

Flora looked phenomenally beautiful and Imani couldn’t stop staring. It had always felt like this even in the worst times. She remembered with a pang of nostalgia not having to wonder if it was reciprocated. 

“What about ‘Gravesend Rag’?” 

“Haven’t tried to play that one since we were at Owlsblood.” 

“Your drumming on that is like your sickest ever,” Flora said. A little warily. 

She was trying to figure it out miming above the drum heads and in the centers of the cymbals trying to hear without playing the sounds. “Studio magic love,” she told Flora. “You should do it on guitar. That one there — yeah, the Jag.” 

Flora cocked an eyebrow. “You think you got it?” 

“Enough.” She laughed. “Let’s do it slow first?” 

It opened with this guitar lick Ras had come up with which Flora played haltingly, grimacing comically, through the multiplicity of shocking, unfamiliar spells Graeme had put on the Jag. To hear it sent a shiver up Imani’s spine. “That’s not quite it,” Flora said. 

“Slide a little more on the — that was it.” 

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah, keep going this time.” 

Flora did. It was so exhilarating to play music with her again that Imani kept losing the rhythm and whenever she did Flora laughed, which startled her even more. They played “Gravesend Rag” once through slow then tried it up to speed three or four runs until they’d gotten it. “‘Feast Day’ now,” Flora said. She gave Imani the tempo on the guitar striking scratching against the strings, trying to keep from beaming. They played that and then they did “End of the River” and “The Professor in Exile” and then, as a kind of dread necessity, they played “A Handful of Dust.” _Do you know what you’ve done to me / I can’t tell what I’ve done to you_ … She could sing a little higher than Flora could and as such took Ras’s mellifluous harmony and though she didn’t think Flora could even hear her over all the echoing scuzzy noise in the tiny room she could see Flora’s mouth shaping out the words. They didn’t dare meet eyes with one another once it was finished. “I’ve written something,” Imani said, out of breath, elated and almost bewildered. “Months ago.” 

Flora looked similarly struck. “Let’s hear it,” she said. 

“Help me figure out the keyboards…” 

They were more complicated than any either of them had used before, and they too had been bewitched with more of the sound-enhancing spells Imani hadn’t known existed. Indeed Graeme had hidden the weed in an old jam jar at the foot of one of the stands, so they had a joint before they went onward. Of course this made the figuring out a great deal more difficult. “Mine is, I just have this pathetic little Casio, you know, at home,” Imani said. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.” 

“Well mostly I was writing while you were asleep. None of the songs are all that good but for this one.” 

“We can make the others better together maybe.” 

It was the most positive and forward-looking thing she’d heard Flora say in months. Perhaps the seeming gravity of this was increased by the marijuana but Imani thought she might cry. Flora was messing with the power converters by the outlet and seemed not to notice. Her lips were pursed tightly and her brow furrowed in concentration and she was still wearing the Jaguar which was feeding back with the strings pressed against the thigh of her ripped-up leggings. Imani had to tear her gaze from her to stand and test the keyboard, which worked, but which had been bewitched to sound like ducks quacking. She nearly fell to her knees with helpless laughter. Flora went to her side and played “Fur Elise,” cackling, the guitar feeding back; her smile was incredible in her face in the red light, crinkling her cheeks and around her eyes… 

“Let me play it, let me do the song for you Flor.” 

“Maybe you want to make it — what are some more dignified birds.” 

“There won’t be any birds, no birds at all, idiot.” 

With magic she tweaked the keyboard sound to match her Casio’s shitty variation on a Farfisa organ. Flora had come around the other side of the keyboard to watch her and when she saw the chords Imani played she strummed the guitar to match. 

“Can you get it to feed back a bit more,” Imani said, but before she had even finished the sentence Flora had cast one of the distortion spells Jack used when he was feeling particularly vengeful. “More whammy bar,” Imani said. “Like as much as you dare.” 

“So like, really loud.” 

“Yes, yes, everything we do together, I want it to be loud.” 

Flora’s face got a little soft which was kind of sweet with all the horrible sound from her guitar. Imani played the main keyboard line over a few times until Flora had figured out a riff to go along with it and then she went onward: 

_Years ago when it all was easy I didn’t worry if you’d ever leave me  
_ _You got yours and I got mine, and the end of time  
_ _wasn’t ever on my mind…  
_ _I thought we’d live forever and maybe I was wrong  
_ _because it’s gone sour between us after not so long  
_ _I wish I’d known it might someday get this way  
_ _I would’ve got down on my knees long ago to say:  
_ _Oh my God, we were just the girls  
_ _but you were my girl and I was your girl  
_ _and we were the only two in the world…_

Flora stopped playing and so did Imani and they looked at each other across the humming keyboard with a shared trepidation. “Chorus is fire,” Flora said finally. 

“Yeah, I thought so.” 

“Can you play from the bridge again? And it’s four lines of lyrics right?” 

“Yeah, then a little arpeggio to tie to the chorus,” Imani said, running the scale on the keyboard. 

“I got it. Go ahead.” 

Imani played through from the bridge. Flora variated her riff from the verses and brought it up into the chorus with a distorted slide down the whole guitar neck. She was standing on her toes like she did when she wanted something to be bigger and wasn’t sure how. Then she sang with Imani: _Oh my God, we were just the girls…_

They played the chorus twice then Flora practically read Imani’s mind to bring the song into the second verse. They made it through all the lyrics Imani had written and then sang the chorus together seven or eight times and then both had a mind to play a solo so they played two solos at once for five minutes. When they finally stopped the silence had a raw and sort of naked wrong feeling and the remnants of the sound echoed softly in the room with their breathing and Imani’s heartbeat in her ears. 

It was the first song they’d ever done together like that, Imani realized. The songs they’d brought to the Hobgoblins usually constituted a bassline and a beat and maybe some words they wholeheartedly expected Jack and/or Ras to misinterpret and otherwise screw up royally. It was an electric feeling to write the bones of those songs together at home and flesh them out in the studio as it was a similar electric feeling to write their pieces of Jack and Ras’s songs, trying to make themselves and their parts indispensable to the sound mostly out of spite or desperation. But this feeling was entirely different and Imani realized with a kind of belated sympathetic shock it was probably how Jack and Ras felt all the time. 

“We should record it and put drums and bass on it,” said Imani, attempting to collect herself. “Alex said there’s an eight-track somewhere.” 

“I have a couple too,” Flora said, “a couple songs, not that good, but.” 

“We could run those through first — ” 

Flora shook her head a little. Her necklaces percussive and metallic against each other. She looked at Imani with this desperate expression of stoned love. Her stubbornness and brilliance. She looked lightning-struck and there were goosebumps on her chest inside the buttons she’d undone from her dress’s collar. 

“I’m sorry for not talking about things,” Imani said. “I’m sorry I kissed Alex back for a little while.” 

“I’m not mad about the last thing, really not at all, because I’ve been a huge bitch and very negative.” 

“You haven’t been so — ”

“You don’t have to lie. You shouldn’t. I’ve been miserable. You were trying.” 

“I was. Because I knew, Flor, I knew we could do this, just the two of us, if we tried.” 

“I didn't know. I didn’t think we could.” She laughed. “I’ve never been so happy, so dearly happy to be wrong.” 

“I just thought if the boys could do it without us with all their fucking bullshit we could do it without the boys. As we historically have had comparatively less fucking bullshit.” Flora laughed again, a pure and bright laugh, surprised by it, shocking as sunlight. “It feels like magic, doesn’t it,” Imani went on. “Better than magic. That feeling which is, we’re supposed to make this together, it’s supposed to be ours. Like we carved it out of space. That you and I have that — we have that too.” 

“You mean — ”

“We’re supposed to be. Is what I mean. It’s proof. It’s — ”

Whatever else it was was silenced by Flora’s mouth against her mouth devouring the words out of it. The pickup of Flora’s guitar scraped over Imani’s belt buckle and the sound felt shivering. So much sound. She pulled Flora closer against her by the waist and the guitar screamed. 

“Take it off,” Imani said against Flora’s mouth.

“Take what — ”

“Take the — ” Laughing and laughing. Flora’s hand on the back of her neck. “Take that bloody guitar off.” 

Flora did and leaned it against one of the amps where it kept wailing. Imani kissed her again. This was what a kiss was supposed to feel like, she reasoned. Her brain was chewing out in gold light. She’s going to leave her lipstick on me, Imani thought, with a shattering jolt — this one more familiar, no less perfect and no less shocking, the longing, four months’ longing, eight years’ longing — all over me… 

\--

“Graeme is letting me borrow his parents’ camping stuff,” Imani said. “Because I was going to run away.” 

“Why were you going to run away.” 

“I didn’t want to have to face this with you. Which seems stupid now.” 

“Yes well, I wanted to face it even less. You had more faith than me that it would be alright.” They were sitting on the floor each with one of the potent hoppy IPAs from the box of beers, sharing a cigarette. The guitar was still feeding back. Imani felt hot all over and perfectly wrung-out. “I don’t think it’ll get — it isn’t like everything is just magically fixed.” 

“Of course not. But it is for today. You fucked the fight out of me. And now we know —”

“We can do it again. Yeah. I can — I can feel we can.”

“We can try your songs if — ”

Flora laughed. “Give me five minutes.” 

Imani kissed her. She tasted like the burnt paper of the cigarette and the grapefruit-bitter bite of the beer. She had meant it to be a sort of soft gentle kiss but it wasn’t — couldn’t be. Flora’s fingers hooked in the collar of her shirt. “Let’s go,” Imani said, against Flora’s mouth, against her jaw and her neck, the sharp bone at her collar, her round freckly shoulder, the shell of her ear, all over her, “let’s go, let’s go together, come with me.” 

“Where?” 

“Out to the woods.” 

“We’ll kill each other.” 

“So?” 

“It _would_ be legendary.” 

“We won’t. You know that.” She kissed Flora’s ear again. Remembering, with a sudden nostalgic bolt, the first night they had heard Jack and Ras on El Rice’s radio show… “It’s fate. It’s supposed to be.” 

“You chalk so much up to the abstract,” Flora said, “dahling.” 

“What do you think it is then.” 

“I think there’s a perfectly logical scientific reason for all of it. I just haven’t decided on what exactly it is yet.” 

“For why good people have to suffer, or — ”

“Well, that’s obvious.” 

“Why?” 

“It leads you to great art.” 

“Isn’t that just fate?” 

Flora made a face. Imani laughed. 

“I don’t want to imagine that the universe conducted all this,” Flora said. “You and me. And Ras and Jack. The four of us. And all of — did Alex tell you about Wray?” 

“Yeah, she did.” 

“I don’t know. I like to think there had to be some free will in all of it. That we found each other trying. That we had to — that our choices brought us to each other. That we can keep making those kinds of choices.” 

“Write a bloody song about it Flor.” 

“I have, idiot,” said Flora, with a reflexive fondness. 

“So play it for me.” 

Flora got up and picked up the Jaguar again and put it on. She struck a single, sharp, cutting chord, swaying back and forth a little nervously on her bare feet, and she shook the body of the guitar until it echoed and wailed its own halting rhythm. Then she sang — 

\--

[On the back of a postcard illustrating in sharp technicolor the strange Victorian brownstones and cobbled streets of Port Townsend, Washington, beneath an unrealistic blue sky, handwriting rushed and cramped]

_Jack Childermass #16605-8H  
_ _Achnairn, Scotland UK_

_Things are alright. We’re going to the woods to write music._

_I don’t remember if I told you we were in a terrible row. Anyway we were. But we started writing songs together, real songs, or they feel real. I get now why it was always easiest for you two to talk with music. It’s not as easy as it used to be. It never will be again for any of us I think because we did too much growing up together to be without each other very well. But it’s better than it was._

_We’re taking the bus as far as it goes Westward tomorrow morning to a town called Port Angeles. Then I guess we’ll hitchhike as far as someone will take us. Onward and onward to the end — as far as it will go — if it ends at all._

_Love. — IR_

[Sealed with the imprint of a red lipstick kiss] 

**Author's Note:**

> this story is dedicated to izzy aka swift_river_singing. thank you so much for the opportunity to write more about two of my favorite girls. if you liked this story, please consider a donation to [new york legal assistance group](http://nylag.org/) in izzy's honor. 
> 
> this is part of my [ongoing charitable challenge](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/159055870440/hello-inspired-by-fandomtrumpshate-and-because) for which you can still sign up. 
> 
> more to come in wizarding seattle circa 1990... stay tuned.


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